When Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-nominated director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, was approached with the idea of making a documentary about the prostitution-related downfall of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, he frankly wondered why. The events had occurred, after all, in a season (2007-08) of rampant tawdry disclosures concerning U.S. politicians, and on the surface of things Spitzer’s dalliances with top-dollar call girls seemed, if anything, rather conspicuously pedestrian.

“When I first started,” he says on the phone a couple of weeks prior to the premiere of Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer at TIFF, “I didn’t really know the parameters of the backstory to it. I mean, it was obvious that he had gone to a hooker. But to find out that it was more Shakespearean, more Greek, in the sense that his enemies worked very hard to bring him down. And that possibly the federal government also found a way to conduct what I ultimately learned was a pretty unethical investigation, in that it was all about outing him rather than charging him. That’s what emerged over time.”

One of the more provocative points raised by Client 9, which not only includes frank interviews with an often uncomfortable Spitzer but with hookers, political enemies and all manner of blue-chip brawlers, is that these days, a sex scandal is never just a sex scandal. (Was it ever?) It’s a means by which power puts it to power. And distracts us from the real story.

Consider where Spitzer was at the time the revelations broke in 2008. He was known as a tireless reformer of government accountability practices, an aggressive opponent of graft and corruption, a long-time pursuer of organized crime, a supporter of same-sex marriage and driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. A liberal. A Democrat. A widely touted presidential prospect. A cosseted trust-fund kid who’d graduated from Princeton and Harvard. A happily married dad. A hellhound on the trail of high-level financial malfeasance in the years leading to global economic collapse.

Ergo, a sitting duck for retributive scandal? A victim of conspiracy?

“The other thing that emerged that was unpredictable — at least at first — was that, at the heart of the film, was a story about political bloodsport,” says Gibney, who worked with Enron co-writer Peter Elkind to secure the participation of Spitzer in the making of the film. “You know, the kind of brutal process that politics is. It sure as hell isn’t beanbags.”

While the heads-will-roll backstory was sufficient to keep Gibney committed to making the film with or without Spitzer’s participation, he courted the scandalized ex-governor anyway, and was cautiously delighted when Spitzer agreed to sit down to tell his side of the story. But even this involved the striking of certain arrangements.

“The only deal we made with him was we said that if we discovered stuff that hadn’t been known before we would present it to him for his comment,” says Gibney. “And that seemed fair enough. But over time I don’t think it was easy for him. There was a lot that he was anxious to talk about and as you can see there was a lot that was very uncomfortable for him to talk about. But what I think the film shows honestly is the difficulty of him grappling and at the same time his willingness to do so.”

Besides, there were potential benefits to be considered. Nothing staunches political wounds like politics.

“At the end of the day,” Gibney explains, “Spitzer realized if he wanted to come back, in any way, shape or form, and I clearly think he wants that, there had to be a reckoning with what he had done. And he was going to have to answer tough questions about it. There was going to have to be a kind of full journalistic investigation, so I think he made a choice that we would be fair and on that basis agreed to talk more honestly than I think he had talked to others. Hopefully.”

It wasn’t easy. Not for Spitzer, nor for his interviewer.

“There were some tough questions that had to be asked because everybody wanted to know the answers and it was also incumbent upon him, since he had made such an issue of his own moral rectitude. It was incumbent upon him come clean and to at least reckon with why he had done what he had done. But it was hard, very hard.”

For Gibney, getting Spitzer to speak so frankly of his indiscretions was a way of getting them off the table so the real story could be told. To wit: What was to be gained by discrediting Eliot Spitzer, the avowed crusader against Wall Street skullduggery, as a hopeless horndog, right on the brink of global financial disaster?

“You lost a very powerful voice,” says Gibney of the timing of Spitzer’s downfall, “who was really booing from a bully pulpit at a time when the world was in financial crisis. I think his would have been a very important voice during that whole period because very few people know as much about the system as he does, and also are as unafraid to speak their minds.”

The disgraced ex-governor, meanwhile, is willfully putting himself back in the public eye, and not for scandalous reasons. He was recently announced as a co-host of an upcoming primetime show on CNN. But the damage — to his reputation, and to the stalled U.S. economy — has already been done. We can only imagine what the climate would look like today if there had been no Spitzer scandal.

“Who knows if it could have turned out differently,” says Gibney, “but I think we may have been able to rudder more effectively against this enormous tide of collapse.”

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